Volume 1, Issue 4
4th Quarter, 2006


Indirect Mind Uploading:
Using AI to Avoid Staying Dead

Paul Almond

page 11 of 13

This process would continue, with the person-specific brain and world models being selectively refined until they reach an acceptable standard. The brain model would finally be run through the simulation process (as would have happened many times during the testing process) so that it reaches the state that it has when it is modelling the original brain at the time when the recording ended (which, if the person whose archives these are has been very thorough, will actually be the time at which biological life ended). The interface between the brain model and the world model would now be removed and the brain model would have its inputs and outputs connected to either the real world or a virtual reality simulation. It would then continue modelling the brain’s response to this environment past the point at which the recording ended. The brain model is now being used to perform a simulation of the original person’s behaviour after the time at which he/she actually died. If it is reasonable to view the computer model as being conscious and to view the similarity between the computer model and the original person as giving it some of the original person’s identity then it would make sense to say that the original biological person has had his mind preserved and is still experiencing things after his/her biological death. The goal of using AI to avoid staying dead would therefore have been satisfied.

A process of this nature is likely to involve running a very large number of models of various versions of you in various simulated worlds for test purposes; if you are considering actually making archives of your life at some point in the future then an extremely paranoid speculation, and one that I find amusing, could occur to you now about your current status.

Confidentiality of Information
Having all this information recorded about you could cause problems. There would be a lot of personal and confidential details and having large periods of your life stored so that people could access that data today could have unpleasant consequences. On the other hand, we would need to make sure that whoever wants to reconstruct your mind in the future could get at the data. Fortunately, there is a simple solution.

Encryption techniques are well developed. These rely on having a decryption key to decode the data. The decryption key is made long enough so that repeated attempts to guess it are not likely to succeed in any reasonable period of time.

Encryption would be used in this way as a sort of time lock, to protect secrets until computing capability has reached a certain level in the future. The idea of using encryption as a time lock has already been proposed by Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and David Wagner[1], who also state that this issue has been previously discussed by Timothy C. May. This work has a slightly different focus than the one being used here. Rivest, Shamir and Wagner proposed encrypting information so that a long period of computation would be needed before it could be decrypted, so that approximately the required time would have elapsed when the computation was complete; their method proposes compensating for expected improvements in processing rates. They also proposed encrypting in such a way as to make the required decryption process highly sequential so that little, if any, reduction in the time for a solution could be achieved by using parallel processing.

In the way that it is being used here, an encryption time lock would not be designed with compensation for future increases in processing ability: it would be designed to explicitly require those future processing rates to perform a decryption in any reasonable time, so the emphasis would be slightly different. It may not be necessary to force the decryption process to be sequential, because, whereas in the scheme of Rivest, Shamir and Wagner, someone who has got his hands on a massive number of parallel processors may be about to try to cheat and decrypt the data too soon, in this scheme such a person may have just the sort of processing needed to recreate a human mind; we are more concerned with how much processing power people in a future society have than when they do the decryption; older cryptographic systems, such as those devised by Ralph Merkle[2], may be more suitable for this purpose.

Ralph Merkle
Image 7: Ralph Merkle. Copyright 1996, John McDermott, info@mcdfoto.com.

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Footnotes
1. Rivest, R. L., Shamir, A., Wagner, D.A. (1996). Time-lock puzzles and timed release crypto. Retrieved June 22, 2003 from http://secinf.net/cryptography/
Timelock_puzzles_and_timedrelease_Crypto.html
(back to top)

2. Merkle, R. C. (1978). Secure communications over insecure channels. Communications of the ACM 291:294-299, April 1978. Retrieved June 22, 2003 from http://www.itas.fzk.de/mahp/weber/merkle.htm (back to top)


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